That's it! No clever wordplay, nothing else. I think it's probably meant to "troll" in about the least nuanced way possible.

I read probably in some comment thread or other that he basically just stole from a thread on the forums about annoying words. And then it appears that he has stopped linking to the forums from his front page! Is this a "fuck you" to the forodes? Probably not! But hopefully.

Saying this revalation, call Delia stationAn initiation, all you'd better bewareWho'll cast the first stone?Skin to the bone, bring it all on home, bring it on for JeromeSo, new castle, build a brand new castle, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeahStraight to the man

Do the do, do the do, do the do doDo the do, do the do do doDo the do, do the do do do do do do do dothe, heading straight for the manOh, you know they'll never evade you

So now I stand here, love cuts down a revolverAm stern damn in Sodom and GomorrahSo I'm singing to King Stone, your teaching it's onThey say it's a fable, though I was made ableI slipped through the net, wanna bet it's a ramble, a sandstormOne slip you don't ever forget, who could ever forget?You know I never forgetStraight to the manOh, you know they're trying to fade you

Saw this revalation, call Delia stationI don't need no powder, one kinder, easy blind yaYeah the eyes of Grande Bretagne owes a debtSay the eyes of Grande BretagneAll the eyes of Grande Bretagne all the eyes ofGrande Bretagne owes a debtYeah the eyes of Grande Bretagne all eyes ofGrande Bretagne owes us a debt

"Anyway, this is the joke of this comic:RANDY: [lists some annoying words]MEGAN: omg stop those words are annoying[Fin.]"

Well, no, he incorporates the annoying words into a coherent but humorously incongruous sentence, that's really the main point of the comic (Randy's comics often are constructed to have one bit of vaguely clever wordplay with a lot of fluff around them that's basically "setup" and "reaction", kind of like the "I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym" in 917). I'm not saying I found this comic particularly funny, but it was, y'know, competent. If he just did what you said it would be irritatingly stupid.

Once again, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal takes a premise (in this case, misuse of words) and crafts a series of punchlines that are all better than xkcd's and with more effort in a shorter amount of time.

@10:50: Pick your discipline of choice. Find the top 5 universities in your country which provide undergraduate preparation in that discipline. Get the list of last year's undergraduates who earnt a 1st class degree / summa cum laude / whatever. Get a copy of their final year projects. Read them.

You're quite likely to find something "vaguely clever".

Even being vaguely clever requires talent and hard work.

Randall supplies neither.

Your standards are too low. Up them before the real world tells you to up yours.

It's supposed to insert the image (basically the URL with image tags around it) as a deterrent to errant copy-pasters. Unfortunately the hebrew gentlemen running blogspot, attempting to save on typesetting costs, spared the tags resulting in the abomination you see before you.

GOOMH, Randall, I lack the social grace to acclimatize to a fluid and changing modern culture so instead I pretend I'm better than it and look down on people who adapt, thrive, and enjoy their lives, too!

The "b" key of my keyboard is broken. When I tried to enter xkcd.blogspot.com to have access to my third favorite nerdy comic hateblog, I entered xkcdsucks.logspot.com and stumbled upon this. I now fully understand what is going on: this blog is financed by a religious group which hates science, geekism and the freedom of thoughts that xkcd brings to the world.

I think Randall's popularity cancels out all science's achievements. On the one hand, we have the Internet and accessible medical care (unless you live in the US). On the other, every minute of my life I know there are people admiring xkcd.

FWIW, give it 2-3 decades and we'll have some sort of quasi-theocracy anyway.

The content may be shit for that particular site, but it can be said without exception that everything "Web 2.0" is worthless. The transition from "Web 1.0" marked the point that the Internet became nothing more than a cheap entertainment substitute for TV.

@Ves 'Calling tripe like this "vaguely clever wordplay" is an insult to people who were actually clever at wordplay, most notably Mitch Hedberg and George Carlin.'

@That anon who keeps writing annoying limericks 'Your standards are too low. Up them before the real world tells you to up yours.'

I'd say both your standards are too high, if we judged "cleverness" in the wordplay of gag cartoons by comparison to the entirety of an undergraduate thesis or the wordplay of great comedians like George Carlin, I think they'd all be failures, even the best ones like Calvin and Hobbes or the Far Side (or if we're just talking webcomics, let's say Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). And when I said "vaguely clever wordplay" I was talking more about the earlier "I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym", less about the current one which I just called "competent" (again by the standard of gag cartoons).

@3:43: I'd say Calvin and Hobbes was the product of both talent and hard work. While the average C&H strip was not groundbreaking, Watterson's work taken as a whole was more than just vaguely clever.

Take C&H's final strip. A cynical cunt (hey, ALTF, your trigger word!) such as myself would see its message in isolation as trite and almost religious in its glorification of an ultimately shitty world. But, coming from Calvin, it meant much more - or, perhaps, much less - and his attitude became touching.

C&H builds on itself and ends up greater than the sum of its parts. xkcd doesn't have this. It's a proto-comic. It's a deformed, disconnected stillborn, vaguely resembling some species but holding no true form. Just because the occasional strip has something resembling a fingernail or an eyelash doesn't mean we have something as beautifully evolved as a hand or an eye.

(We do not mock the nonsentient stillborn because we feel for its distressed mother, but Randall does not grieve over his unworthy issue. His solution to failure is to fail more.)

tl;dr A single strip is rarely a masterpiece but a series can certainly form one. Watterson's cool and Munroe's an idiot. What's new?

Holy SHIT guys. I just read the last couple news posts of his and stumbled upon some shocking and disturbing news. Not only is he engaged, but it's to the WRONG girl!

Who is this Ellen person? Is she real? If she were a fake concocted by Randy so he can feel good about himself, then why would he not fantasize it's his beloved Megan? Is this odd choice of name simply to throw us off the trail? If she is, in fact, real, then is she aware Randy is a creepy-ass motherfucker?

What's most puzzling, however, is how someone like Randy, a known basement dweller, ever ventured even UPSTAIRS- let alone outside- long enough to meet a girl and that she didn't run away screaming in horror immediately afterward.

God damn, I ignore xkcd for a few weeks, and not only does it spend that time telling the tale of a man slowly going mad, but xkcdsucks empties out?

Anyway, in light of the new comic, I'd like to think Randy and Ellen invite the neighbors over to browse videos of cats, children, and fat angry atheists shouting about republicans, as well as the occasional let's play. Otherwise, I am pretty sure nobody in the world does this.

Next on xkcd:The problem with popcorn reassemblyThe problem with using your tongue to pick up coinsThe problem with farting through keyholesThe problem with dancing inside an active ovenThe problem with using aluminum foil for underwearThe problem with growing tomatoes in the kitchen sinkholeThe problem with

OMW to post that the real problem with YouTube parties is that there's no such thing as a YouTube party, I discovered that Anon 11:08 had beaten me to it. Curse you, Anon 11:08. Curse you. Also, Captcha, what is a bjorker?

guys can i ask why none of you like xkcd? i think its a very clever comic and i think its hilarious my lecturer always shows slides of the comic during lectures and if you dont get the jokes then you shouldnt spend your time writing on a website that its not funny when really its the funniest site on the internet

If you're sending out facebook invitations for a youtube party, then ok, you're probably a major loser. But it happens that you have a dinner party and around desert, someone opens the laptop to show a video and then everybody wants to show his own video. Then I guess this could qualify as a youtube party. If you never did that, then either you don't have friends or you don't have a laptop, or you hide your laptop when you invite your friends over, or you're so cool that you cannot imagine a party not taking place in an abandoned factory with refined house music, various drugs and multiple sexual encounters. But then, what the hell are you doing on xkcdsucks???

Sure, at uni in the dorm we might just be sittin around and watch a few funny videos on youtube to kill some time for a bit. Or if I'm at home, my brother may come into my room and ask me to watch this video he's found. But a youtube party? What is that? Where people plan an event where they meet to sit and watch youtube videos? Isn't that just really lame? We all knew Randall was a loser, but this is just another confirmation of that. A party usually involves more than 5 people, a lot of drink, music, and general hi-jinks and fun stuff. Not sitting at a table with a laptop.

(2) But drinking until you pass out because you lack the courage to do anything while remotely sober is also pretty lame;

(3) Casual sex definitely has more staying power but HURRR I FUCKED LOTS OF RANDOM SLUTTY CHICKS is really code for I HAVE HERPES AND AT LEAST ONE OTHER UNPLEASANT STI. Work hard, get a well-paying job and learn how to speak and dress - you'll find that dipping your dick into as many buckets as possible is both easy and unrewarding.

Quantity, not quality, boys. We're up to 919 but there was zero value beyond 3-400.

I am off to the great US of A in a few hours. It seems I must attend a four-day seminar on “Weapons Handling and Conflict Avoidance” as a pre-condition of our NGO funding. BP is exempt – he already knows how to weaponise conflicts and avoid handling. It is now understood that, it seems, I must carry a sidearm and wear body-armour while ‘in the field’. This is a first for me. Apparently I get to choose which sidearm I like. I was thinking of requisitioning a Colt .45 Model 1873 Single Action Revolver and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum Revolver. I want Pearl handles though – only a true homo would use ivory ones.

I personally felt that the strip wasn't so much about the words themselves, but the way some people mash them together incoherently, the sentence in the comic being an exaggeration of it (or maybe not an exaggeration given the internet...)

Still not particularly good (still boils down to "Here's something I don't like and someone reacting negatively to it!") but I think the analysis here is slightly off.

Here's what's been bugging me the most about xkcd lately (aside from its usual shittiness): whenever Randy tries to show two characters just plainly talking to each other, one of them is almost always facing the other direction on a laptop. And they don't even turn around a lot of the time. Who are these people and why don't they want to make eye contact while carrying on a conversation?

Autistic/Aspergers pride isn't that weird of a concept, really. Just because someone has a disability doesn't mean they should be a wallowing pile of self-hatred. What's weird is people who get angry when you call it a disability and insist that they're better than normal people and the only reason it gets labeled as a disability is that normal people don't understaaaaaaaaand how their brains work. It'd be bad enough if they just refused to acknowledge that yes, being unable to read social cues is a problem (it's society's fault for inventing them, obviously), but some of them go farther than that. They assume that everyone with autism is some kind of super-genius and that they're better than normal humans. For a disorder that tends to make one obsessive and nit-picky over minor things you'd think they would be offended by the popular idea that everyone with autism is the Rainman, but no, they embrace it. It'd be like if blind people insisted that everyone who was blind was Daredevil, and that it's sighted people who suck for not having super-cool radar powers and ninja skills. It's baffling.

@9:00: Indeed. Although I've noticed a shift to the "well SOME people with autism are brilliant" line from a lot of self-diagnosed e-aspies.

To which I say: so what? SOME quadriplegics are brilliant, but that doesn't mean we celebrate quadriplegia itself. It's not insane to learn from someone who has achieved cool stuff DESPITE their disability, but that's as far as it goes. Autism doesn't make you cleverer, and there's no unique brilliance which requires you to be autistic.

Furthermore, geeky antisocial singleminded absentmindedness may help you channel your efforts into a particular complex task but is absolutely not autism. Nor is being clumsy autism. Autism is, vaguely, the inability to perform certain social tasks subconsciously. It doesn't mean you lack the means entirely: it means that the tasks are challenging. In the worst cases, they're so challenging that trying to live independently is too dangerous (e.g. being overwhelmed in a crowded street and getting run over). This is simply not the problem most geeks have.

Finally and most importantly: being a dick, blaming others and making a long-winded bullshit justification about something you find difficult are not consequences of autism. These are the worst traits of e-aspies because they make things much harder for the real austistics: I'm not one, but my experience with those with severe autism is that it's a horribly disabling disorder and barely makes you able to communicate, let alone be a jackass.

Did you know the tradition Saxon Family unit comprised: The wife, the children, the husband and an unrelated little boy, often autistic, for the husband's non-procreative pleasure?I know! It shocked me too!

Dearest Scott,I would love to attend, but I have to worm the dog and wash my hair.Regrets.

This is like the "parallel inspiration" that Leibniz had shortly after visiting Newton and coincidentally passing by the drawer which had all his draft papers on the method of fluxions. But he swore he neeeeever saw them.

@11:29: That comparison is an insult to Leibniz. Whether or not Leibniz saw Newton's notes, he did something better than Newton: his notation kicked Newton's notation's ass. He understood that suggestive notation is useful and strongly affects the way people think about the material. That is indisputable truth, and Leibniz deserves credit for that at a minimum.

The text of 919 suffers from the same problem as 550; Randall tries to cram too many memes/obnoxious words into one sentence and while the result may be vaguely grammatical it doesn't make a lick of sense. Also, there is a pregnancy joke.

I hadn't seen Ryan Learn's bold step forward into the ring of rational debate before. Thanks for sharing, Rob. It was a pleasure to see his wanton idiocy so roundly rebuked. If such events were a daily occurrence, XKCDsucks would rock.

As it is, all the poetry will have to do. On an unrelated note, ants totally kick ass.

I've had one gathering that degenerated to a "Youtube Party". The queer community at my university were great to have someone to talk to in my first semester of university, but once I had made friends based on interests instead of a convergent sexuality the "gay friends" were terrible and I gradually drifted apart from that group. I had three gay friends over; I made them dinner (two were vegetarians) and we played Singstar.

Someone got out my laptop and showed a video. Gay / trans / feminist activists manage to be fucking boring and obnoxious at the same time. I can't remember this terrible comedienne, but she had a "parsimmon diet" which involved eating only fruit. Then for 20 minutes she talked about shitting in her car in a really vulgar way but the expression was half-arsed. A male comedian would have made a shitting joke that lasted 10 ish seconds, full of feeling, and you'd get belly laughs from real people and these fucktards would complain about how he's a privileged voice and he marginalises women and desensitises society to the plight of incontinent people etc fuck I hate these people.

And yeah, the only person actually ever watching a video was the person linking. Everyone else seem to have this "oh MAN everyone will LOVE this video and everyone will think I am the best for linking this video" thing happening, ready to watch the next video. So I'd say that it's a pretty accurate insight, but it took me about.. ten minutes? to discover, and that's the only time I've had this sort of thing happen. I didn't need the word "youtube party" or being in that situation more than once to get how it works. I think most of the xkcdsucks people who are just confused as fuck as to what Randy's talking about would also figure it out quickly.

@1:31: The problem with xkcd is not that it is bad - lots of things in the world are bad. The problem is that people have such low standards that xkcd has a considerable following. It is this latter issue which needs fixing.

Representative democracy has put us into the irresponsible mindset that we can make our vote, wash our hands and then blame the government/corporations for everything. But we must always blame the voter; blame the consumer; blame the enabler.

You don't like right-wing conservative nutjob politicians? Don't rally against them - rally against the neighbour who voted for them. You don't like xkcd? Don't shake your fist in the air at Randall - use it to punch the guy in your class who keeps pinning up the latest strip on the noticeboard.

I'm not saying that it's time for a bloody revolution against the xkcd fanbase, but I would empathise with people holding a sentiment in favour of one.

people have such low standards that xkcd has a considerable following. It is this latter issue which needs fixing.

So why have you adopted the tactics of 13-year-old Valley girls?

All of the problems -- the lazy art, the weak jokes, the copied jokes -- are the same problems with the comics you claim are great. You could make a blog about any of them and copypaste Rob's whingeing verbatim. Try it.

(Do they still mutilate infant penis in the USA? I thought it was bad enough when I heard people routinely declaw their cats, but apparently you like emasculating your humans too. Once you've emasculated them, you use rights disparity and desperation to offshore their jobs. Oh, and you're responsible for Randall Munroe. Bravo, America, bravo.)

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

Divided into two convenient categories, based on whether you think this website

Rob's Rants

When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.